Tag Archives: religion

Toxic Religion and Politics

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 I Wish I Were a Lily Pad

In times like this, I wish I were a Lily pad.  Lily pads don’t make stuff up. They know nothing of nations, politics, or religion. Nothing about the reckless ambition of the “Seven Mountain Mandate” or the New Apostolic Reformation to turn the USA into a Christian nation.

picture of Lily pads

There are no mountains or mandates here on the wetland pond. No illusions of grandeur. No deceit. No presumption of superiority. No striving for dominion over the cattails, Trumpeter Swans, red-wing blackbirds, muskrats, and beavers.

Aesthetic appreciation and science tell me that the Lily pads are in trouble. Monet painted water lilies a century before toxic run-off from the fields began to poison the lilies and the ponds themselves. The wetland pond by the A-frame cabin is smaller and shallower than it was six years ago. I wonder how long before it’s gone.

No Greatness without Goodness

The intersection of religion and politics is my thing; it’s the place where I live. So is history. American presidents, generals, and diplomats have attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville two sentences about America’s “genius and power” and its goodness and greatness.

Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great. — attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.

If Tocqueville were visiting America in 2024, he would find his second sentence has already happened.  As for the first sentence? Instead of churches and pulpits that were “the secret of [America’s] genius and power,” Tocqueville might find himself in churches where the only thing left is the toxic myth of religious and national exceptionalism. He would find pulpits aflame with the fire of the Seven Mountain Mandate — the road map to Christian dominion over the seven mountains of American life: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. The theology is Dominionism. Its politics are nationalist. The combination is toxic.

Anxiety and fear are linked, but they are not the same.

To be mortal is to be anxious. Anxiety looks for a foothold, i.e, a secure footing that will not change, crumble, or allow your feet to slip. During the Third Reich, National Socialism turned anxiety into fear. The targets of fear and hate were specific. Jews, Gypsies, “homosexuals,” etc. became the ‘deviants’ whose elimination was necessary for restoring a pure Aryan race and culture. Conformity, obedience, nationalism, and racial supremacy left no room for nonconformists, critics, dissenters, and deviants. This video tells the story of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s radio rebuke of Adolf Hitler’s radio address two days before.

Toxic Greatness

The German Church did not dissent. It saw no problem genuflecting on Sundays while saluting Hitler seven days a week. Except for the small “Confessing Church” movement and its “Declaration of Barmen,” Christians across Germany showed no sign of cognitive dissonance in professing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior while practicing obedience to Hitler and German nationalism.  Jews were Christ killers, Gypsies were weird, and “homosexuals” were ‘vermin’. The Church joined the movement to “make Deutschland great again.”

When, after the end of WWII, Albert Einstein spoke respectfully of the Church, he was not speaking of the churches that bent the knee to German nationalism. He was speaking of the Confessing Church of Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller.

photo of Albert Einstein

“Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I am forced to confess that what I once despised. I now praise unreservedly.“

Two Roads Diverging

The American Church of 2024 is divided between those Tocqueville, Niemöller, Bonhoeffer, and Einstein might find reason to praise, and the churches that would make them weep. 

Two roads diverge again this year. If we take the road of the Seven Mountain Mandate, we will look back on the road not taken with more than a sigh.

Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian Minister, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, Oct. 23, 2024.

“I don’t know that I’m right”

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Marcus Borg‘s answer to the question “How do you know you’re right?” is spot on.

“I don’t. I don’t know that I ‘m right.”

Barkley Thompson reports the exchange in yesterday’s posting on God in the Midst of the City following Dr. Borg’s death, re-posted today on Views from the Edge as “Tribute to Marcus Borg (1942-2015)”.

I never met Marcus Borg. I wish I had. We were born in 1942 within a few months of each other. You might say we grew up next door to each other in different towns. There’s something about time that situates people in the same location, asking the same or similar questions, searching the same search, vexed, in our case, by the early horrors of World War II, German concentration camps, the Holocaust, and the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As children of faith we grew up asking how we could square a loving God with the stacked bodies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the economic disparities of poverty and injustice of racial segregation.  As happened to a lesser extent with some of his peers, Marcus developed a theology and Christology that rose out of these compelling questions about the real world that had shaped him, and the irrepressable hope for something better that drove him deeper and wider as he grew older and wiser.

Marcus’s humble response to the questioner who asked how he knew he was right -“I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m right” – is one for the ages. If only we could clone it to create a humbler humanity of neighborliness across all the terror our world is making, we might fetch the blessing from the curse of absolute religious certainty.

“God’s dream for us is not simply peace of mind, but peace on earth.”- Marcus J.Borg & John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas, 2007, HarperOne.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, January 22, 2015

 

God wounded in Paris

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Today’s news from Paris is chilling. Still reeling from the Charlie Hebdo attack, hostages are taken in a Kosher (Jewish) market in Paris. Fear of extremist Islamic terrorism spreads across France.

During a gathering of twelve of us at The Reformed Roundtable in Indianapolis two days ago, South African anti-Apartheid leader  the Rev. Dr. Allan Boesak quoted none other than John Calvin, according to whom whenever a human being wounds another, God is wounded.

The killers and hostage-takers in Paris claim the name of Allah. Their abuse of the name is an affront to faithful Muslims who reject violence and terror as much as adherents of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Religion itself, whatever its form and doctrine, is to be measured by its compassion.

Events in Paris remind me of Dr. Boesak’s statement and the Very Rev. James A. Whyte‘s sermon at the January 9, 1989 memorial service after Pan Am flight 103 carrying 259 passengers exploded over Lockerbie December 22, 1988. Eleven more were killed on the ground in the small town of Lockerbie.  The Church of Scotland reluctantly called it’s Moderator, James Whyte, out of mourning his wife’s death for his to preach at the memorial service for the victims of the terror at Lockerbie.

In that sermon he proposed a vexing answer to the vexing question: Where was God when the plane went down? “God,” he said, “was on the plane.” 

“Justice, yes; retaliation no,” he declared. “For if we move in the way of retaliation we move right outside of the fellowship of Christ’s suffering, outside of the Divine consolation. There is nothing that way but bitterness and the destruction of our own humanity.”

Four hundred years after Calvin’s statement and decades before James Whyte’s sermon at Lockerbie, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following from his prison cell before he was hanged by the Nazi’s whose “God” was without compassion. Bonhoeffer wrote as a disciple of Jesus, the Crucified, but his picture of God as suffering and the call to stand with God in God’s suffering int he world of human cruelty represents the compassionate faith shared by compassionate people of every stripe.

Christians range themselves with God in his suffering; that is what distinguishes them…. As Jesus asked in Gethsemane, “Could ye not watch with me one hour?” That is the exact opposite of what the religious man expects from God. Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world. He must therefore plunge himself into the life of a godless world, without attempting to gloss over its ungodliness with a veneer of religion or try to transfigure it. He must live a ‘worldly” life and so participate in the suffering of God. He may live a worldly life as one emancipated from all false religions and obligations. To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent or a saint), but to he a man. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.  [Bolded type added]

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Today God is wounded again…in Paris, and we participate in the suffering of God at the hands of a cruel world.

 

Creating hell in the name of heaven

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Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
– John Lennon

The bombs were heard in my living room last night.

The echoes of last Sunday’s suicide bombing of a church in Pakistan that killed 80 people sounded in the voices of two Pakistani members of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, Minnesota where I serve as pastor. Twelve members of the church had gathered to talk about something totally unrelated to Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Christianity and Islam. We were there to share. The quiet horror of Samuel and Nasrin – “I was sad all day.” – was like a bomb going off in the living room. I ask myself, why? What is happening?

I am a Christian, a disciple of Jesus. Strange as it may seem, I often feel the way John Lennon did. I dream of a different kind of world where there are no more bombings or shootings in a Kenyan mall, in Peshawar and Lahore, Pakistan, in Baghdad, Damascus, or Boston in the name of God. I am tired of all claims to righteousness, whether professedly religious or professedly secular. I would like to wipe the human GPS of its magnetic field between due North heaven) and due South (hell) and re-orient us all toward the rising sun.

The voices that fight for heaven to erase hell do not all sound the same. They speak Urdu, Parsi, Arabic, Hebrew, and English. They claim different names: Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and sometimes secular. They live in different parts of the planet in different time zones and different climates. But if you listen, they all sound alike and they do the same thing.

They do not look up at the sky. They look down. They march in lockstep rhythm because the Quran or the Bible or nationalism tells them to. They live for tomorrow – for heaven or some version of it – not for today. One doesn’t have to strain to see what’s happening, and, when anyone sees it, how can one help but imagine a different world, a different kind of humanity: one without religion?

The bombing in Peshawar last Sunday is said to have been a payback for American drone strikes that had killed innocent civilians in Pakistan. For the suicide bombers, the Cross was the emblem on the shields and helmets of Christian Crusaders. Back then the Knights Templar of Holy War killed with swords. Today the suicide bombers associate the Cross with the drone attacks of the Christian West.

Religion is with us and, depending on how one defines it, always will be. A wise elder statesman, Elliot Richardson, observed toward the end of his life that religion is the problem, but that if we erased all of the religions were erased from the face of the Earth, they would re-invent themselves in a heartbeat. Why? Because that’s how we’re made. As defined by the likes of Emile Durkheim, Margaret Meade and Paul Tillich, religion spans a much wider terrain than the belief systems for which heaven and hell are essential. Furthermore, whether or not we are professedly religious, each of us has some kind of inner GPS, some version of a societal ideal (heaven) and a social and personal horror (hell).

What’s happening across the world is profoundly and earth-shakingly religious. Though our languages are as different as Arabic is from English, and as far from each other as Peshawar and a mall in Kenya are from a Quran-burning church in Florida, the voices of Abraham’s three children (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) all sound the same whenever we create hell on Earth in the name of heaven.

For the Pakistani friends in my living room last night the Cross stands for a divine interruption of the cycle of violence and all claims to righteousness. In the crucifixion of a Palestinian Jew of the First Century C.E. what we see is anything but the excuse for a crusade to eliminate hell in the name of heaven.
The Jesus we seek to follow threw his life into the spokes of the wheel of violence to stop it, and we must do the same.

Every Sunday worship service concludes with a “Charge” – an instruction in how to live.

Go forth into the world in peace.
Have courage.
Hold on to that which is good.
Return no one evil for evil.Support the weak.

When the bombs tear through a church or a mosque or a neighborhood in the name of our imagined heaven for the righteous, we need to remember that there are Muslims, Jews, secularists, and other religious practitioners who seek to practice the way of peace…”living for today” throwing themselves into the spokes of the wheel of violence.

The American Religion

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“A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community…all those who adhere to them.” – Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, p. 17.

Emile Durkheim is one of the fathers of the social sciences and the father of sociology. When he first studied the aboriginal people of Australia, he carried with him a bias against all religion.

“During Durkheim’s life, his thinking about religion changed in important ways. Early in his life, as in Division, he argued that human societies could exist on a secular basis without religion. But later in his life he saw religion as a more and more fundamental element of social life. By the time he wrote Forms, Durkheim saw religion as a part of the human condition, and while the content of religion might be different from society to society over time, religion will, in some form or another, always be a part of social life. Durkheim also argues that religion is the most fundamental social institution, with almost all other social institutions, at some point in human history, being born from it. For these reasons he gave special analysis to this phenomenon, providing a philosophy of religion that is perhaps as provocative as it is rich with insights.

“According to Durkheim, religion is the product of human activity, not divine intervention. He thus treats religion as a sui generis social fact and analyzes it sociologically. Durkheim elaborates his theory of religion at length in his most important work, Forms. In this book Durkheim, uses the ethnographic data that was available at the time to focus his analysis on the most primitive religion that, at the time, was known, the totemic religion of Australian aborigines. This was done for methodological purposes, since Durkheim wished to study the simplest form of religion possible, in which the essential elements of religious life would be easier to ascertain. In a certain sense, then, Durkheim is investigating the old question, albeit in a new way, of the origin of religion. It is important to note, however, that Durkheim is not searching for an absolute origin, or the radical instant where religion first came into being. Such an investigation would be impossible and prone to speculation. In this metaphysical sense of origin, religion, like every social institution, begins nowhere. Rather, as Durkheim says, he is investigating the social forces and causes that are always already present in a social milieu and that lead to the emergence of religious life and thought at different points in time, under different conditions.”
– Paul Carl’s entry on Emile Durkheim published June 3, 2012 in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: a Peer-Reviewed Academic Resource.

QUESTION

Later sociologists like Robert Bellah look today at American society and ask what “sacred things” are enshrined in American culture and practices.

What are the equivalent beliefs and practices, “sacred things” set apart or forbidden, that give coherence to a fast-changing American society?

Verse – Towers

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Of course a tower is built by starting from

the bottom.  Strong workers and machines make

a joint to earth with wet, grey gravel–form

with time a foundation almost like rock.

Orange steel is welded, riveted, and made

to stand naked pointing skyward.   Then blocks

and bricks are hoisted slowly up the side

providing covering flesh the tower lacks.

…

Small children make towers in trees, and these,

though only made of rotting boards, still stand

as proudly strong in little children’s eyes

as those from which much older men descend.

But both kind of towers still seem to say

with their builders:  we look down on the sky.

[from The Anglican Theological Review, early  1970s]

Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL

Abounding in Thanksgiving: the Economy of God

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Solitude and Society Sermon

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The inward being and the secret heart

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I’ve been silent for awhile, absorbed in preparing a manuscript for submission, and the site will remain pretty silent over the next three weeks.

Between now and then, this sermon on YouTube was preached last Sunday at Shepherd of the Hill, the wonderful congregation I’m privileged to serve in Chaska, MN.

It is based on the 51st Psalm (selected) and sees the psalm in light of a rite for the cleansing of a leper in the Book of Leviticus in which the leper presents two birds.

1 Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.

3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.
…

6 You desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
8 Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
9 Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.

13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
14 Deliver me from bloodshed, O God,
O God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.

15 O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 For you have no delight in sacrifice;
if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Marriage Equality in Minnesota

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gaymarriageMy younger son is gay. For 12 years he’s been in a committed relationship in New York.

His response to the news that Minnesota will now become a marriage equality state was:

“Great. One more state in which I get to choose not to get married!”

He doesn’t want to get married. He just wants for anyone who chooses the covenant of marriage to have that choice. He just wants to live his life.

In 1978 students at The College of Wooster began “coming out” to me in the safe space of my office at The Church House”, the campus ministry center that housed the offices of the College Church, Westminster Presbyterian Church. I served the dual role of Pastor of the church and Pastor to the College of Wooster.

Dr. Violet Startzman, the physician at the College’s Health Center, came home with the results of a three-year study on homosexuality commissioned by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Westminster sponsored public forums, adult studies, and less formal conversations about the core finding of the study: same-gender orientation is not a choice; it’s part of the natural spectrum of human sexual attraction and love.

It was in that context that previously fearful or confused students shared in the privacy of the pastor’s office and found affirmation. They were active in the college church. They were ordained (student) elders on the church board.

My story since then is complicated, more so than I would like it to have been, in retrospect. Pastors are teachers and educators as well as advocates. Those of us who seek to minister to a congregation wear the mantle of conflicting responsibilities of conscience, patience, unity, and advocacy. We are first and foremost rabbis (teachers). Teaching is different from preaching, although the good preacher is also a teacher. And teachers begin by respecting their students, no matter what their views are on a given subject. Each of us perceives the world through eyes that see what experience has taught us to see.

When my son came out to us, we were grateful. Grateful for his self-knowledge. Grateful for his trust. Grateful that a (not-so-secret) secret was no longer a secret. So very grateful and proud of who he was as a young man and all that he had done and stood for.

Now, today, I am in Minnesota. He is in New York. I, like him, am grateful that there is one more state in which he can choose whether or not to be married.